♀Anne Granger

Anne Granger (c. 1743 – 1811) was an Acadian woman, deported from Nova Scotia as a girl, who married in England while held there as an exile, spent twenty-two years in France and came to Louisiana in 1785, where she was buried in Assumption Parish. Her own great-grandfather was an Englishman: a sworn family declaration of 1767 names him as Laurent Granger, born at Plymouth, who converted to Catholicism and married an Acadian woman at Port-Royal. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Julie Trahan (born 1765).

Early life and the Deportation

She was born about 1743 at Rivière-aux-Canards, in the parish of Saint-Joseph, in the Minas district of Acadia, a daughter of Jean Baptiste Granger and Magdeleine Landry. She had an elder sister, Marie Marguerite, and three younger brothers, Simon-Joseph, Pierre-Simon and Jean-Baptiste. Her father’s parents, René Granger and Marguerite Thériot, had died at Rivière-aux-Canards; her mother’s parents, Jean Landry and Madeleine Melançon, were probably deported to Boston.

The family’s descent was set down in 1767, in France, in declarations the exiles made under oath. Her sister’s husband declared that the Grangers descended from Laurent Granger, “born at Plymouth in England”, who had married Marie Landry at Port-Royal “after having made abjuration”^W, that is, after formally renouncing the Protestant faith and being received into the Catholic Church. He was Anne’s great-grandfather. The descendant of an Englishman, she was among the Acadians the British deported in 1755.

Her family was carried first to Virginia, which refused the exiles and sent them on to England; they reached Falmouth, in Cornwall, on 17 June 1756 and were held there with the Acadians interned at Penryn. Both her parents died there in 1756. The Anglican parish register of St Gluvias, Penryn, records the burial of her father on 23 October 1756 as “Jean Baptiste Grangé, neutral”, the English term for the Acadians, whom the British called the French Neutrals.

Marriage in exile

On 10 January 1763, at Falmouth, she married Jean Chrysostome Trahan, an Acadian from Pigiguit whose parents had also died there. Her husband’s elder brother Joseph had married, at Falmouth in 1757, a different Anne Granger, also of Rivière-aux-Canards: her first cousin, the daughter of her father’s brother François. The family declarations of 1767 tell the two women apart only by their fathers’ names.

When the Seven Years’ War ended in 1763 the Acadians held in England were sent to France. A published transcription of the roll of the king’s ship La Fauvette, which sailed from Falmouth to Morlaix on 26 May 1763, lists the couple together, the wife under her married name as Anne Trahan, with a Paul Trahan, whose relationship the list does not give, and a Jean Baptiste Granger; her brother of that name was living with the couple four years later. Their first child, Julie, was born at Morlaix, in the parish of Saint-Martin, on 13 July 1765.

Belle-Île-en-Mer and Nantes

By early 1767 the family had been settled with other Acadians on Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the south coast of Brittany, in the village of Kerlan in the parish of Bangor. Her husband’s declaration of 26 February 1767 records that her youngest brother, Jean Baptiste, then about fifteen, was living in their household; her brother Pierre Simon lived with their married sister at Le Cosquet, in the parish of Locmaria. With both parents dead, the younger Granger boys had been taken in by their sisters.

Her children baptized at Bangor included Marie Magdelaine in January 1768, Marie Marthe in 1770, Jean Chrysostome in September 1774 and Joseph Rose on 17 April 1777. At Marie Marthe’s baptism on 2 October 1770 the register names Anne’s sister Marie Marguerite, “sister of the mother”, and the godfather was Estienne Le Grand, a bourgeois of Le Palais, the island’s town, who also stood godfather to a son of her sister at Locmaria the year before. Some time after April 1777 the family left the island for Nantes, and on 12 January 1780 her daughter Marguerite was born and baptized at Saint-Martin de Chantenay, on the edge of the city.

Louisiana

In 1785 the Spanish crown carried the Acadian exiles from France to Louisiana. A published transcription of the passenger lists puts the household aboard L’Amitié: her husband, aged 43, Anne, aged 41, and seven children. The same transcription places her cousin and namesake, by then the widow of Joseph Trahan, on another ship, Le Beaumont. Whether the original rolls agree with these lists is not known.

The family made its home on Bayou Lafourche, in the district of Assumption. Her daughter Julie married Joseph Leblanc at Donaldsonville on 27 October 1787, and Marie Magdelaine married François Boudeloche the next year; Marie Marthe married Joseph Daigle in 1800 and Marguerite married Joseph Maitrejean in 1802, both at Assumption. The Louisiana registers, kept in Spanish, call her Ana Granger, and describe her children as born at Belle-Île or at Nantes.

She was buried at the Assumption church at Plattenville on 28 July 1811, recorded as “Ana, age 68 yrs. of Acadia, married to Chrisistomo Trahan”. Her son Joseph Rose was buried there in July 1815, and her husband in November 1815, recorded as the widower of “Ana Grange”.

Notes

The two 1767 declarations disagree on her birth year by one: her husband’s gives 1744, her sister’s husband’s 1743. Her age at burial, 68, agrees with 1743.

A compiled history of the Acadian exiles calls her Anne-Françoise and her father Jean Granger. The Bangor baptism register of 2 October 1770, read from the image, also names her “Anne Françoise Granger”, so that form is on record; the 1768 act calls her “Annette”, and the other records call her Anne. Her father is Jean Baptiste in her own family’s declarations of 1767 and plain Jean in a declaration made by Granger kinsmen at Le Palais, which names the same wife and the same deaths at Falmouth. A baptism of 1743 at Grand-Pré of an Anne Granger, daughter of René Grange and Angélique Caumaux, was once proposed as hers; the 1767 declarations name her parents, and that child was someone else.

Her mother’s parents

Only one sworn statement names them: the declaration of her sister’s husband, Jean Baptiste Thériot, made at Belle-Île in February 1767. It gives her mother as Magdeleine Landry, daughter of Jean Landry and Magdeleine Mélançon, “tous deux transportés à Boston”, and names each grandparent’s own parents. Arsenault’s compiled genealogy of the Acadians gives the same couple and says Jean Landry lived at Saint-Charles-des-Mines before he was deported to Boston. The body spells the grandmother Madeleine Melançon; the declaration writes Magdeleine Mélançon. Because the names rest on one declaration with compiled support, the sentence in the body is hedged.